Authors: Robert Reed
The Well of Stars (35 page)
“You stupid, silly creature,” she said. “Don’t you see what I am to you … ?”
Nothing. Apparently that’s what Mere was. Her brazen words were followed by a prolonged silence and a perfect
stillness. Watching the sky display, she continued to observe their long plunge into the Great Ship, and she secretly doubted if she had done even a little good. Then came the sudden violent slurp of water in motion, the world beneath her pushed aside by a whalelike mass. What resembled a pair of jaws rose high on both sides of Mere, and out of reflex, she hunkered down, throwing her sticklike arms around her bowed head.
stillness. Watching the sky display, she continued to observe their long plunge into the Great Ship, and she secretly doubted if she had done even a little good. Then came the sudden violent slurp of water in motion, the world beneath her pushed aside by a whalelike mass. What resembled a pair of jaws rose high on both sides of Mere, and out of reflex, she hunkered down, throwing her sticklike arms around her bowed head.
In an instant, she was swallowed.
In another instant, the excess water had been purged, and she found herself collapsing on a cushioned bed, the wet air hot enough to burn, a great invisible hand shoving her downward, face and belly against a dense slick fat, the pressure almost suffocating her.
The whale was a small shuttle, she guessed.
The shuttle was changing trajectories, fighting the Great Ship’s enormous pull as well as its own momentum. Mere breathed in gasps and low sobs. When she had the energy, she managed to whisper, “We are much the same.” And with the next breath, she added, “In some ways, identical.”
“Are we?” said a close, curious voice.
“But what it is, what everyone assumes you are …” she began.
The acceleration increased, splintering the frailest of her little ribs.
“You are not,” Mere said, gasping with a wrenching pain.
“What am I not?”
“Gaian.”
The hull began to scream, a few first breaths of atmosphere racing past. She listened to the roar and listened for any other words. But the shuttle remained mute, diving steeply into the newborn atmosphere. Turbulence shook both of them, and the gee forces again pushed her deep into the glistening white-as-milk fat. Then the noise fell away into a lesser rumbling. Bruised arms lifted. Hands too small for a child closed into limp fists. Quietly, she
wept, breathing with the tightest little breaths, and when the miseries didn’t lessen, she realized that for the first time in her life, she had a mortal’s body. The polypond had resurrected only the most ancient of her flesh, DNA and proteins dancing slowly, slowly and desperately trying to heal her myriad wounds.
wept, breathing with the tightest little breaths, and when the miseries didn’t lessen, she realized that for the first time in her life, she had a mortal’s body. The polypond had resurrected only the most ancient of her flesh, DNA and proteins dancing slowly, slowly and desperately trying to heal her myriad wounds.
“What am I?” the voice wondered.
With a sob, she said, “I do not know. Not exactly.”
“But I am similar to you, you think?”
“In a fashion—”
“Then what precisely are you?”
She told her story. With a gasping voice, in crisp, measured phrases, she explained how she had been born between the stars, alone. She described her solitude and the slow painful progression of light-years and the centuries. But her oblivion ended with a world and a living people, and that one, long, painful blessing continued to bring joy beyond measure as well as rich gifts of memory and belief.
Mere paused, and the shuttle began to split and deflate.
Within moments, the heat shield and flesh were ripped apart by an armored beak, and she found herself sitting on the narrow back of a very long avian—a giant albatross in form, but with its long wings folded into tough stubs and some kind of jet supplying thrust. They were flying across a brutally rough sea, barely high enough to avoid the tallest waves. Some kind of demon-door surrounded her, keeping the air motionless. Into that enforced stillness, she said, “You weren’t Gaian. And you aren’t. What the captains and I assumed from the first … we didn’t understand your history …”
“There is no history,” the polypond replied.
“Because every history is valid, or so claim the shadows.” Mere made herself laugh. “Every past is genuine and ignorable. Isn’t that what you believe?”
Silence.
She said, “Interesting.”
The sea beneath her was jammed with moving bodies
and swift, brightly lit machines. Sprays of iridescent vapor rose high on either side, and pushing through the demon barriers and antinoise baffles were hints of thunder and titanic screams.
and swift, brightly lit machines. Sprays of iridescent vapor rose high on either side, and pushing through the demon barriers and antinoise baffles were hints of thunder and titanic screams.
“I had stars to watch,” Mere continued. “My starship was nearly dead, but I could look out at a universe full of light. While you … you were drifting through the black cold depths of the nebula, alone …”
Again, silence.
“Your blessing was the ship that you were riding inside. I think. I think.” She nodded with a growing certainty. “It was intact, for the most part. It possessed a fully equipped recycling system—a biosphere in ajar, in essence—and if its engines were dead, at least you didn’t have much momentum to fight. You were drifting. Do you remember? Not well, I think. It was millions of years ago, after all. And you were a tiny, lonely, and possibly insane mind. Who knows how much of what you remember are only delusions?”
“I remember everything.”
“Delusions,” she repeated. “Hundreds and thousands of years of daydreams and madness. And then without warning, you found what?”
“Many beginnings,” it argued.
“No. Just one. Probably a lump of tar and ice, which was more than you needed.” She paused, breathing softly while holding her ribs. “You were a single organism equipped with a talented array of machines, and with the machines’ help, you survived. You prospered. Or at least, you managed to replicate your onboard reactors, and you re-formed your little world in some fashion. But without any other species with which to work … with nothing but your own clinically clean body, its narrow genetics and finite number of cells … you gradually, very gradually, managed to invent something that approached a genuine biosphere …”
The jets beneath her gave a kick, the avian streaking faster across the tumbling waves.
“Gaians are rare,” Mere admitted. “But they always emerge from living worlds. Inevitably, they are compilations of many species. Animals and plants, microbes and fungi. Every Gaian I know of, and those very few that I have been lucky enough to meet … they share traits. They are self-centered. Self-obsessed. But they aren’t gods, nor do they pretend to be. Because gods require worship, and worship is not possible for them. They are so utterly self-possessed that the praise and fear of .another entity, small or giant, simply cannot interest them. And the praise of their own pieces … well, that’s like me expecting my own thumbs to deify me …”
She laughed.
“You had a little world,” she said. “You were alone, and you were insane—impoverished in every sense, and probably for tens of thousands of years—but written in your own genetics was the compelling, irresistible need to be with others. You were a social organism. I’m guessing. And following the whispers of your genes, you eventually hit upon the idea of cloning yourself, introducing little tweaks and odd mutations to make each one of you serve some increasingly narrow niche.
“Instead of a Gaian twisting a million species to serve one great function, you eaused a single organism slowly to grow complicated.
“Alone, you began to fill your sky.
“With sufficient tools, this could happen. Not quickly and never neatly. I imagine there were some early disasters and ugly little wars between disagreeing groups of clones. But eventually, you developed tricks and the essential hard-wiring to keep all of your increasingly far-flung pieces joined in spirit. In soul.”
An enormous wave rose up before them, then with a great slow motion, it receded, revealing a round region of ocean that was different—a zone marked by agitated white foam spread across dark, almost black water.
The avian tilted its head and rose higher.
“In the end,” Mere claimed, “there is not much of a
distinction. Between what you are and what a Gaian would be. But I’m not talking about ends. Not now, at least. Beginnings. That’s what I keep coming back to.”
distinction. Between what you are and what a Gaian would be. But I’m not talking about ends. Not now, at least. Beginnings. That’s what I keep coming back to.”
The avian tucked in its wings, accelerating upward.
“You believe in a universe that isn’t quite real. That isn’t finished, and that has no lasting consequence. Which is a horrible thing to believe, I think. Most of the souls I know are rather like me. Not you. Which makes me wonder: Why are you so considerably different?
“It’s not enough, blaming your impoverished beginnings. If I was in your place … if I had been born in a starless black, and if I had stumbled on this odd awful theory before any other … well, maybe I would have believed it. But later, when I learned about other species and the stars … I’d like to think that eventually I would have let doubts sink in, and found hope … I would have let the past become something real, full of consequences, and the future would look like a realm where I could live and live happily …”
The white foam had dissolved beneath Mere. For kilometers on every side, the water was calm and dark, like ink in a great bowl.
She was flying above one of the ship’s main ports. Had the alien breached the hull? Or were the captains responsible?
To the best of her abilities, Mere didn’t betray her fears.
Instead, she calmly said, “No.”
Shaking her head, she said, “In another fashion, we couldn’t be more different.”
The avian had attained the high reaches of the atmosphere. Beyond the demon-doors, the air was thin and cold, while beneath lay a great deep realm as black as the sky.
“You weren’t born alone,” she said, with a plain, certain voice.
Then with a grim, sorry nod of the head, she added, “I think there was somebody else. Or many others. I think
your oldest memory … the single image that drives to this moment … is that someone very much like you said to you, ‘You are banished. You are not fit to live with us. We banish you for all time.’
your oldest memory … the single image that drives to this moment … is that someone very much like you said to you, ‘You are banished. You are not fit to live with us. We banish you for all time.’
“Those others sent you wandering in the nebula, alone.
“You were a child still, or nearly so. And you still remember enough that the memory aches, and it sickens you, and of course you’ll cling to any theory or lame belief that promises you that every awful thing in your past has no consequence.” Mere shook her head, telling the sky, then the water, “If you are sufficiently clever and perfectly ruthless, you have the chance to obliterate everything that has hurt you. You will erase a past that you won’t let yourself believe in, but that you cannot, despite all your cleverness and muscular beliefs, ever get free of … !”
“I do not know you well, sister.
“The utter pure and perfect truth is that what I know is what the great captains have learned about you. In painstaking detail, they have studied your genetics and the repeating structures inside your cells and organs, your tiny bodies and great. They have teased apart what has been borrowed from aliens, separating it from what seems to be yours. And what they have found—what they have shown to me and explained in some detail—are similarities and stark parallels between your vastness and my little self. We are not the same species, no. Too much time and too many circumstances have been crossed. Your brilliant reinvention of yourself has erased much of what you were. But like me, you possess a cobalt-based blood and a five-carbon sugar metabolism. Like me, your mind is wet and elegant, born inside young tissues set between our largest limbs. We are profoundly conservative
souls. In our details and even with the broadest sweeps, we hold true to our natures. Out of all the possible bodies to weave, you have a reflexive need to produce bodies very much like mine. Modified, yes, but true to their origins, and even now, they dance in the lung-wet atmosphere above your great body … like the grin worn by the happy human apes, you cannot help but show your truest, oldest self to others …
souls. In our details and even with the broadest sweeps, we hold true to our natures. Out of all the possible bodies to weave, you have a reflexive need to produce bodies very much like mine. Modified, yes, but true to their origins, and even now, they dance in the lung-wet atmosphere above your great body … like the grin worn by the happy human apes, you cannot help but show your truest, oldest self to others …
“You know me not at all, sister.
“In your presence, I am a baby. Twenty thousand years ago, as this ship counts time, I was born as a finned larva swimming in an ocean world. Ooloo, we call our home. Ooloo is our name. We are a modest species, free of age but not so durable as most, happily scarce and free of ambition. But we are not innocents, and we are not afraid of the company of others. For as long as our history flies, we have produced heroes who gladly abandoned their home skies, riding with the visiting star-travelers to see what else there is to be seen, sending home songs and images and elaborate scents harvested from a thousand worlds, experiences the rest of us can still enjoy today, and embrace.
“This ship we ride upon and within … what do you truly know of it … ?
“I was a baby by every measure when we first heard the Great Ship singing from between the stars. It still lay in the distance, but closing. Using old machines and timeless tricks, we built a tiny starship, and in a race that cares more of form than speed, a thousand babies sought the honor of the journey. I finished second in the competition, which was worse than last. But as happens sometimes, luck took a role. The winner was killed in an accident that was not an accident, and I survived an equally unlikely disaster. Then it was learned that the Ooloo who finished third had conspired against both of us. Guilty of murder, he was sentenced to the ritual doom given to any despicable soul: His wings were chopped free, and his still-living body was saddled with weights,
and while I was riding off on my great adventure, he was dropped into the ocean, plunging into the black depths where his wingless form would live out its life alone, slithering about in the deep black mud, subsisting on detritus and his own endless misery.
and while I was riding off on my great adventure, he was dropped into the ocean, plunging into the black depths where his wingless form would live out its life alone, slithering about in the deep black mud, subsisting on detritus and his own endless misery.
“I know you, my sister.
“When I arrived in this place, my first friend was a great captain. Washen welcomed me and explained her essential laws to me, and in payment for my passage, she took title to a dry little world that orbits our sun. Perhaps to be made into a new home someday. And with many thanks, she accepted the full, unabridged history of the Ooloo, including every account from that ancient time—that very brief period—while my species actively sought to plant their own colony worlds across the universe. About that time, I knew little. I know much more now. Washen visited me recently, asking about a grand mission to another watery world. A colony was to be established. And by all accounts, it was a successful colony. But we eventually lost interest in far-flung possessions, and our citizens returned home. It was during that long unhappy voyage that a baby was conceived and born. While the starship skimmed along the wispy edges of a young nebula, the baby died suddenly. His slightly older, possibly jealous sister was blamed. The records are thorough. Even today, the trial survives as a digital record, untouched by the millions of years. Washen explained how teams of AI scholars, working at the brink of lightspeed, had noticed similarities between that family’s genetics and your own. Certain coding sequences remain true today, woven into thousands of your oldest genes, including an odd and useless mutation in your cobalt blood, and what is certain is that the death of the youngster was either an accident or a malicious murder, and that the homebound citizens could accept nothing that smacked of leniency. They ordered the girl’s wings cut away—tiny wings barely half-grown—and in a ceremony honorable and cruel, they lashed the criminal into a suit of metal and threw her into the depths of the black nebula.
“Her survival was quite unlikely. But plainly, you did survive. Which cannot be explained, not by any record brought here by me. No. No, I can only assume that a parent, or perhaps both of your parents, stole supplies from the ship’s stores. A fusion battery, I imagine, plus enough recycling equipment to keep you alive for thousands of years. And that is why you could survive at all. The illegal and immoral charity of grieving parents saved a little girl—saved you—and then you were dropped into the blackness and made blind. Across the thousands of years, you forgot your past life, and I can only imagine how awful your existence must have been.
“You should know me, my sister.
“I have always tried to be the honorable Ooloo—a worthy emissary representing my tiny species—and in that vein, I must tell you this:
“If I could, I would strip away your wings a second time.
“Seeing what you are doing now, and knowing the awful thing that you are attempting, I would if I could happily chop off every last one of your wings and toss the miserable pieces of you not into any blackness, but into a blaze of fire. Not into a cold endless gloom, but into the kind of brilliance that burns, blinding you in that more perfect and eternal way …!”
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